As digital video and audio products grow in popularity, there are increasing demands for video and audio editing products. Existing commercial video editors can be used as specially-configured editing machines provided as independent equipment, or video editing software can be installed on multi-purpose equipment such as personal computers. When using either special or multi-purpose equipment, an operator is often faced with issues such as unfriendly operating environments, time-consuming operations, etc.
Traditionally, while performing editing such as film cutting, an operator must find the desired portions to be edited by rapidly playing back the film/video. As a result, the operator must closely look at the monitor while searching so as to find the portion to be edited. While editing, the operator must usually repeatedly perform similar operations to reach desired results. Consequently, traditional editing technologies are very time-consuming and inefficient, and tend to cause eyestrain for the operator. Operators who are not trained professionals particularly find it difficult to perform image editing due to inconvenient operation and other factors.
In addition to the foregoing “pure” editing operations, further difficulties arise with synthesis editing (i.e., combination or “mash-up”) of raw materials such as dynamic images, static images, and audio (e.g., music), and more complex editing operations such as adding special effects, text, etc.
Moreover, as networks get more popular, operators can acquire various video and audio files from the Internet or local area nets. In other words, if an operator intends to perform image editing, he can acquire desired image files via a network. However, since image files usually have large sizes, they demand relatively more bandwidth for network transmission. As a result, it takes a long time for operators to merely perform the download operation while acquiring video from a network. In addition, memory and other hardware resources that are allocated to a network browser are usually very limited. Therefore, operators tend to be unable to acquire images to be edited from a network, and to perform online editing, in real time.
Therefore, online video and audio editing methods, devices and systems are needed to provide more user-friendly operations and to make it possible to preview and perform editing operations, such as cutting, synthesis (combination), special effects addition, etc., in real time on desired material acquired from a network, and/or from databases contained on the computers/editing devices and related equipment.